NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points.
Project Subscriptions
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Advisories
| Source | ID | Title |
|---|---|---|
Github GHSA |
GHSA-qrvq-68c2-7grw | nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS |
Fixes
Solution
No solution given by the vendor.
Workaround
No workaround given by the vendor.
References
History
Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:30:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| Description | NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points. | |
| Title | nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-409 CWE-770 |
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| References |
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| Metrics |
cvssV3_1
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Projects
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Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: GitHub_M
Published:
Updated: 2026-02-24T15:59:17.926Z
Reserved: 2026-02-20T17:40:28.448Z
Link: CVE-2026-27571
No data.
Status : Awaiting Analysis
Published: 2026-02-24T17:29:03.393
Modified: 2026-02-24T21:52:01.367
Link: CVE-2026-27571
No data.
OpenCVE Enrichment
No data.
Github GHSA